What It Feels Like...to Survive a Chemical Attack

By
Mohammed Aziz, 43, disabled

Jul 19, 2007

As told to Kathryn Wilson. Translated by Aram Khoshnaw

The first wave of Iraqi planes -- about eight of them -- started bombarding my city, Halabja, around 11:15 a.m. on March 16, 1988. Napalm. The explosions were so bad, it felt like the city was a piece of paper, shaking. That continued every fifteen minutes until about four. Kids were crying, women were crying; it was so loud. We were in a three-by-four-meter concrete bunker under our house.

I was a history student at Baghdad University, home for spring break. The Iraq-Iran war was raging. We are Kurds, and the Saddam regime was trying to move people forcibly to the middle and the south of Iraq.

Then the chemical attack started. Those explosions felt different -- not as loud. We did not know it was a chemical bombing, but after a while my eyes grew runny. The smell was a burning-gas smell. We used gas in our houses for cooking, so we thought that the bombs had exploded some of the gas in our houses. It was like a rotten-cucumber or rotten-apple smell. People's eyes were becoming red and watery, and they started to sweat all over their bodies. They were vomiting.

By this time, we were trying to flee to the Iranian border, about twelve miles away. My mother, who was sixty years old, was calling our names and saying, "Are you alive? Are you still there?" I was twenty-four, and I was strong enough to at least help a couple of my family members. I tried to grab them and help them get to the outskirts of our city. After two or three miles, we just could not -- even I could not continue. In the end, the chemicals killed seventeen members of my family.

I had burns underneath my armpits, like if you were to put an iron on someone -- a reddish area with spotting and some blackish, yellowish color. I had excretions coming out of my nose and mouth that never ended, pain all over my body. Places around my eyes and my face were blistering because of the tears I was shedding. I could not breathe throughout all of this.

On our way we saw horrors: kids dead, kids without their parents, animal carcasses. People were hot, so they went to whatever creek they could find. But it was night and the water was so cold. We traveled on foot for four to five miles, then on tractors. It was difficult to move because of rain and the muddy ground. It took us two days.

Although the war was between Iraq and Iran, the Iranians helped us and saved a lot of lives. They were a mixed group of volunteers and members of the Iranian Red Crescent -- both Kurds and Persians. They were very nice and spoke Farsi and some Kurdish, but we lived close enough to the border that we could understand some Farsi. The first thing they did was give us an injection into our muscles [probably steroids or antibiotics, according to Aziz's doctor]. We felt nauseous and dizzy, and we didn't know if it was because of the injection or because we were so tired and scared. They asked us to get our clothes off, and they burned all of them. They took us through huge showers in a field hospital and told us that was the best thing to do at this point: take a really long shower. I could not see much, so somebody grabbed my hand and gave me a soap bar and told me to shower with cold water until I finished the soap.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.